Devoted to tips and other info on how to use your Mac to read and write languages other than English

Friday, November 1, 2013

OS 10.9 Mavericks: Language Glitches

Some major language problems found so far in the new OS X:

+You can no longer set the keyboard layout for Kotoeri Japanese input in its preferences, but have to rely on the layout of the last keyboard used. This is a throwback to the OS X of several versions ago and extremely annoying, especially for those with JIS keyboards. They have to activate and select the US layout before using Kotoeri. Apple has issued a tech note which recommends disabling all other input sources, but this is not a satisfactory solution for most users.

+The Message > Text Encoding menu item has been deleted from Mail. This makes it impossible for the user to fix wrongly encoded incomings or set the outgoing encoding to meet the special requirements of recipients, and significantly reduces the language capabilities of Mail compared to other email clients. (Note: Not fixed in Mail update of 11/7/13)

Users can force Mail to send UTF-8 by including a Unicode dingbat in their message, if that is of help in a specific case.